Please provide me with the name of the airline so I can investigate - as a UX developer this is unacceptable and I take personal offence to such horrible experiences.

Yet another opportunity to point to the canonical and excellent falsehoods programmers believe about names.

Honestly, I don't understand that. Hyphenates are not uncommon at all, at least in Germany, but surely in other countries as well. How can it be that they don't take that into consideration?

@Sneftel you underestimate the power of boredom, social media and persistence.

This is absolutely rediculous from the part of the airline or whatever agency did their OBE.

Have a name that includes a hyphen, an accent; Can confirm UX is weirdly focussed on alphabet input. Banks, Airlines, Government Services, all have at one point or another rejected my correctly spelled name, forced me to enter it incorrectly and then later bemoaned the non-equivalency. It is a disgrace.

@BurhanKhalid Sabre Corporation (owned by American Airlines), in 1960. Presumably they assumed that we hyphenate-named hippies wouldn't be allowed to board a flight in any case. ;-)

(Incidentally, having travelled to around 20 countries, I can anecdotally confirm that they don't care whether you remove the hyphen or replace it with a space.)

@Sneftel - that's the GDS, not the OBE. OBE didn't exist back in the '60s. Generally the OBE is contracted out to a vendor, who then has APIs to the GDS.

How many of you read the word "rediculous" above as a match for "ridiculous"? Everyody, I thnk. But to make the match, we used human language sklls and intelligence. This is what is needed.

And, of course, my comment on somebody else's typo contained a typo of my own!

@EdmundReed, it wasn't the airline, but a Chinese travel booking site's English version. The only thing they did right was to label the fields "surname" and "given names", not "last name" and "first name". I had such high hopes based on that! When I called them to ask what I was supposed to do with their contradictory instructions, the agent found out that the airline's system allows up to 28 characters (though still no hyphen). However, I don't know Chinese, so I couldn't go directly through the airline's website.

Two artificial constructs interfere with the ordinary operation of human intelligence. One is automation, and the other is bureaucracy. Both are at work here. When bureaucrats behave stupidly, it is usually because they have been directed by some other bureaucrat to do precisely that.

+1 for the hilarious writing:)

When automatic systems behave stupidly, it is usually because some programmer told it exactly what to do. Programmers from Germany way well be aware of the hyphen issue, but programmers from the US or China probably won't be. And the spec writers may or may not alert the programmers.

And how about people with an "ñ" in their name?

@WalterMitty hey now! Hyphenated names are reasonably common enough in the US (mostly as a product of marriage, but nonetheless reasonably common, and it does become their legal name) that any US developer not permitting a hyphen is naive, dumb, or hamstrung by bureaucrats ;)

@WalterMitty, U.S. passports don't do diacritics, so ñ is irrelevant to the ticket-to-passport correspondence problem for U.S. travelers. The rest of the world just resigns itself to the fact that computer systems eat diacritics (and/or choke on them).

"some benighted ancestor of her husband's chose to spell his last name with a hyphen, and his hapless descendants have been fighting with bad form/database designs ever since" - sounds like something Bobby Tables would say.

The OP made reference to a non US passport.

Reminds me of a QI tangent: "Lord Elgin and Duncan (one name) once went to a dinner after dropping the latter half of his name. He saw his place at the table listed as "Lord Elgin". The person sitting next to him was "Duncan""

@WalterMitty: I just re-read what I wrote, and I definitely did not make a reference to a non-US passport. Also, JPmiaou is the sister in question.

Does the fact that it's not a hyphenated name "in the usual sense" really matter?

@AzorAhai: well, if nothing else, it matters in the sense that my sister is heartily sick and tired of being addressed alternately as "Mrs. Long" and "Mrs. Lastname", depending on how a given telemarketer (or worse, school administrator) thinks hyphenated names ought to work. But in this case, it matters because it means abbreviations that would be valid (in some sense) for some hyphenates would not be valid for her.

@martha I understand. I have a hyphenated name too. But I don't consider using one or the other to be correct either, and it certainly wouldn't be correct on a airline ticket

@Jpmiaou are you sure? I'm pretty sure I've seen friends from Puerto Rico with Ñs in their passport. I believe the MRZ has either NN or NXX, however.

@guifa, I know from personal experience that U.S. passport applications do not allow accented letters if you fill them out digitally, and if you fill them out by hand and put the diacritics in, the marks will be ignored/omitted. (The surname that started this discussion also happens to originally have an o-umlaut [ö] in it.) The rules may be slightly different in Puerto Rico.

@Flater I don't think there ever was a Lord Elgin & Duncan. (There is a Lord Elgin & Kincardine.) That's not the only thing on the QI page of which I'm skeptical.

When I flew last summer, I found that my boarding pass showed my two given names as one word (“Namename Surname”). No one remarked on the discrepancy.

@JPmiaou Just be glad your name isn’t Hubert Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff, Sr. (that’s the abbreviated version, mind). You’d probably crash the airline’s systems altogether and make planes fall out of the sky that way. Plus being female and going by Hubert Blaine could get a bit confusing in some circumstances.